Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist's Inquiry into Western TechnologyPrinceton University Press, 2012 M09 17 - 360 páginas Technology, perhaps the most salient feature of our time, affects everything from jobs to international law yet ranks among the most unpredictable facets of human life. Here Robert McC. Adams, renowned anthropologist and Secretary Emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution, builds a new approach to understanding the circumstances that drive technological change, stressing its episodic, irregular nature. The result is nothing less than a sweeping history of technological transformation from ancient times until now. Rare in antiquity, the bursts of innovations that mark the advance of technology have gradually accelerated and now have become an almost continuous feature of our culture. Repeatedly shifting in direction, this path has been shaped by a host of interacting social, cultural, and scientific forces rather than any deterministic logic. Thus future technological developments, Adams maintains, are predictable only over the very short term. |
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... existing needs or demands but would create and satisfy previously unrecognized ones. New technologies converge with modernity in embodying a primary direction—toward indefinitelyexpanding the realm of individual powers of expression ...
... existing records is an important obstacle that is difficultto overcome. Patents are an instructive case in point, and much will be said later about the general deficienciesin patent records as an adequate representation of the sources ...
... existing pool of knowledge, but the agents primarily responsible for introducing them are not independent scientists or engineers but entrepreneurs and teams working under their immediate directions. Unlike inventions, which tend to ...
... existing product lines. It only became DuPont's most commercially important discovery after being successively fittedinto new niches firstfor stockings and later for tire cords, structural plastics, and carpeting.35 All of this is ...
... existing technological infrastructures and placed within existing systems contexts. Nathan Rosenberg has drawn together some marvelously telling examples of this inability to perceive the consequences of technological change. They ...
Contenido
3 | |
36 | |
3 Technology and the New European Society | 69 |
4 England as the Workshop of the World | 104 |
The American System Emerges | 138 |
6 The United States Succeeds to Industrial Leadership | 173 |
7 The Competitive Global System | 212 |
Technological Change in a Borderless World | 253 |
Notes | 279 |
References Cited | 301 |
Index | 327 |
Otras ediciones - Ver todas
Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist's Inquiry into Western Technology Robert M. Adams Vista previa limitada - 2012 |
Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist's Inquiry Into Western Technology Robert McCormick Adams Sin vista previa disponible - 1996 |